Ho-Hum

Last week was a pretty standard, boring, ho-hum week.  It's nice to have those every now and then.  Busy and on the go is fine too, but it's tiring and I feel like I fall behind on taking care of "stuff".

Spencer found my nail buffing block last Sunday and wanted a demonstration so I buffed all of his nails to a glorious shine.  Michael walked in during the demonstration, stood silently staring at us, left and came back with the camera.  I think he slowly shook his head in disbelief at one point. 

Elliott and I went to the mall on Monday.  I saw this shirt at H&M.  It is a somewhat decent attempt at writing in the International Phonetic Alphabet.  But, and this is a big but, IPA does not use any capital letters.  And the diacritic marks are completely wrong.  And the vowels in "don't" are highly suspicious.  I guarantee they did not ask a speech language pathologist to do this transcription.

Anyway, I posted this picture to the Speech Language Pathology group I belong to on Facebook and it set off a firestorm of discussion.  We all agree that the capital letters are unforgivable and that they were transcribing a speaker with a typical British accent.  Oh, and that the "don't" is just wack.

SLPs are rather particular and nerdish about our passions.

Monday was National Margarita day so I bought this as part of the celebration.

Elliott was more than happy to test it before lunch.

I made a Mexican fiesta for dinner and low-carb, sugar free margaritas for the adults.

Spencer and Michael were both wearing green shorts that evening.  It was cute.

\Elliott and I ran a bunch of errands on Tuesday.  We ended up at Hobby Lobby where drawer knobs happened to be 50% off.

This happened.

Before

After

Before

After

The whole desk

Spencer got new wires in his braces on Wednesday.  I feel like we should rent a studio apartment in the orthodontist's office. The office is in Mesa and we spend more time driving there and back than we are actually there.

The appointment was on the short side, but I still struggle to keep Elliott occupied while Spencer's in the chair.

He wanted to take a picture together but the assistant needed to talk to me just as we took this.

He occupied his time while I was talking to her and I didn't realize the camera was still on.

The zoom button on our camera is sticking and I was messing around with it on Thursday night when I accidentally discovered you could change one of the features to take a "burst" of pictures.  This is the burst that I didn't take on purpose.  It changed the lighting and filters on its own.  I didn't pick them.

And that is where I will leave you.  We did do some fun stuff over the weekend, so I will let you anticipate that for the next post and not cram it in here at the end.  I promise it will be less ho-hum.  Not awesome by any means, but not boooooooooooring. 

A big week for Spencer

Last Tuesday (the 16th) Spencer had his last running club meet for the year.  There were about five schools from the district participating.  I took way more pictures than I am showing here, but each kid was wearing a shirt with their school's name/logo and each kid had on a tag with their name, school and their grade.  I am not going to be the person that puts all those identified kids out there on the internet for everyone to see, but I'm also not going to spend tons of time editing all of them.

Spencer and his friend from school.  They were in the same classroom in 1st grade, but not this year.  They were also the exact same height in 1st grade, but not this year.

I'm not sure of the exact distance of the race was but it took Spencer about 20 minutes to run it.

It was the 16th so we also tried to get Elliott's 4 year 2 month picture.  

We didn't have enough time to really get into a good location though.

I can't show any of the finale pictures because it was going to be too hard to edit out all of those shirts and name tags.  The same is true for the beginning of the race actually.  They gave ribbons to the top five runners (five boys and five girls) for each grade.  Spencer was not in the top five.

After the whole thing was over we tried again for Elliott's picture.  The sun was just a wee bit too reflective though.

This worked better.

Official

On Wednesday I volunteered in Spencer's class doing Art Masterpiece.  We did a lesson and activity about sculpture.  The kids were supposed to sculpt their own animal.  There were lots of snakes and snails.  Spencer's in in the middle.  He made a whale shark.

On Thursday Spencer tested for his next belt in aikido.  He's been doing aikido for about 18 months now (with a 3 month break last summer).  He went from a white belt to a green belt to a green belt with two stripes.  Now he was testing for his orange belt. 

I haven't been to any of his classes since his new teacher started in September.  His classes are on Thursdays and we have it worked out that Michael goes to work early that day so he can pick up the kids so that I can stay at work later since I go in later after I get them to school and daycare in the morning. 

Don't tell anyone, but I snuck out of work a bit early that day.  I made it up the next day.

There are lots of pictures, but not much to say about them, so just scroll.

The test begins.

Spencer picked a friend from class to help him with his tasks.

We went out to dinner after the class.  Mostly just because I was too tired to cook.

OK.  The rest of this is non-Spencer related, but it's too blah to warrant its own post.

I started staining the upper cabinets on Saturday.  I took before pictures on Friday.

This is after the first coat.

Michael did a lot of yard work on Saturday and somehow the kids ended up out there with him and then they somehow put on swim suits and then somehow they ended up in the pool.

I felt the water.  It was freezing.

My friend Joni's husband, Blaine, is a musician.  He was playing at a restaurant/bar close by on Saturday so Maryellen and I went for happy hour to listen to him.  He also paints in his spare time and painted our whole house back when we bought it in 2012.  For the first time ever I noticed some paint splatter on the side of the cabinets when I was cleaning them the day before.  I made sure to (jokingly) give him a hard time about it.

Joni didn't know we were going so I texted her this picture with the message "check this sh*t out".   Then we had a funny exchange about us stalking Blaine and being hard core drunk. 

And finally, Ginger was a totally elegant lady that night.